Maths on the Move

To celebrate the Commonwealth Games happening this week in the UK we are visiting one of the venues, the velodrome in the Lee Valley VeloPark in London.  The velodrome, with its striking curved shape, was built for the London 2012 Olympics.  In the run up to the 2012 Olympics, we talked to structural engineers Andrew Weir and Pete Winslow from Expedition Engineering, who were part of the design team for the velodrome, about how mat...

June Huh has won one of this year's Fields Medals at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The Fields Medal is one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics. It is awarded every four years "to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement". Up to four mathematicians up to the age of 40 are awarded a Fields Medal each time.

June Huh. Photo: Lance Mu...

Hugo Duminil-Copin has won a 2022 Fields Medal for his work transforming the mathematical theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Fields Medals count among the highest honours in mathematics and are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to researchers up to the age of 40.

Hugo Duminil-Copin (Photo Matteo Fieni, used with permission)

In this podcast, which comes to you from a bea...

James Maynard has won a 2022 Fields Medal for "spectacular contributions to number theory". Fields Medals count among the highest honours in mathematics and are awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to researchers up to the age of 40.

James Maynard (Photo by Ryan Cowan, used with permission)

In this podcast, which comes to you from the opening day of the ICM 2022 in Helsinki, we tal...

Hello from Helsinki! We are very pleased to be bringing you coverage direct from the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) – one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar. The ICM takes place every four years and it's usually the biggest maths conference of them all, attracting thousands of participants, and also sees the awards of some very prestigious prizes, including the famous Fields Medals.

This year...

We are getting very excited - next week is the International Congress of Mathematicians  (ICM)- one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar!  The ICM takes place every four years and it’s the biggest maths conference of them all, attracting thousands of participants, and also sees the awards of some very prestigious prizes, including the famous Fields medal.

We are fortunate to have been able to interview the prize winners i...

We all have our favoured methods of shuffling cards, but most of us don't think any more about it once we've started playing a game. But there's so much more to be discovered! In this podcast mathematician Cheryl Praeger and magician Will Houstoun reveal the maths and magic behind shuffling cards. And as this podcast, first published in March 2021, was the first podcast we produced in collaboration with the Isaac Newton...

In this episode we meet the irrepressible Anita Layton. As well as leading a busy research team, Anita also spends much of her downtime fostering diversity and mentorships throughout her networks, and is professionally engaged across disciplines as distinct as applied mathematics, computer science and the medical sciences. She was also voted one of 2021’s top 100 “Canada’s most powerful women”.

We are very pleased to host this e...

"We all work with exponential growth and we're really, really used to it, but we are still amazed at how fast things take off at the end." This is epidemiologist Matt Keeling talking about how a disease outbreak can still take you by surprise even if you've been working in the field for 25 years.

Matt's team at the University of Warwick has been running one of the main models that have informed UK government on ...

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for men in the UK and second most for women. During the first lockdown from March 2020, elective cardiac procedures and outpatient consultations were postponed and many appointments have not yet been rescheduled. In addition, those who were suffering from heart conditions did not see their GP or come to hospital. The resulting backlog presents a huge challenge.

In this podcast, f...

Have you every wondered about what goes on behind the scenes of Plus? Find out in this special guest episode! 

We are very pleased to be collaborating with the wonderful  Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) in Cambridge. Recently Plus editors Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas appeared on the INI's Living Proof podcast, talking to the INI's communication's manager Dan Aspel. 

We talked to Dan about...

It's amazing what you can see now thanks to remote imaging technology! Visiting far away landscapes via satellite images or watching live feeds from a famous street is fun, but remotely gathered images offer exciting opportunities to map and observe the world. The problem is that the vast amount of remotely gathered data now available is useless on its own – we need to have the means to analyse and extract information from thos...

How do you go about predicting something as complex as the Earth's climate? In this podcast — featuring climate modelling experts Emily Shuckburgh and Chris Budd — we explore what those climate models look like, the uncertainties involved in climate modelling, and also why the predictions need to be taken seriously despite those uncertainties.

We also look at the simplest climate model of them all— the energy balance model — an...

In this week's podcast we reach into our archive for a favourite story we first heard back in 2010!

The quantum world is usually associated with the weirder end of physics, including strange phenomena like superposition or quantum entanglement, the "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein called it. But it turns out that quantum mechanical processes occur in living systems too. Some species of birds use quantum mechan...

Although people often talk about the links between maths and music, if you're neither a mathematician nor a musician these links might not be that obvious. In this podcast we get to explore the connection by going on a tour of the La La Lab exhibition with curator Daniel Ramos, talk to Jürgen Richter-Gebert, who created some of the exhibits, and asked Andreas Matt about the work of Imaginary, the group that produced this exhibi...

Like many early career researchers, Francesca Scarabel has moved around the world to take the first steps in her career: from her home in Italy, to Finland for her PhD, to Hungary and Canada for postdoctoral research.  Now she works at the University of Manchester as part of the JUNIPER modelling consortium.

We spoke to Francesca about what it's like being part of the mathematical emergency response, the importance of local kn...

The Mathematical frontline podcast is about the mathematicians who are grappling with the unprecedented challenge of studying a live pandemic unfolding in front of their eyes.

In this podcast we are really pleased to talk to Ed Hill, a member of the  modelling consortium from the University of Warwick, where he is also part of the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology & Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research group (SBIDER). Ed...

Like many couples, Ellen Brooks Pollock and Leon Danon, have had to make it through the pandemic juggling lockdowns, child care and work.  But unlike many of us, they have also both been working together on the mathematical front line of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Ellen and Leon are both both from the University of Bristol. The are members of the JUNIPER consortium of modelling groups from across the UK whose research and insights f...

Mike Tildesley is now a professor in the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology and Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research at the University of Warwick  - but he started out doing a PhD in astrophysics, which is far literally and mathematically from studying the spread of diseases. We talked to Mike in July 2021 about his unusual route into epidemiology, the work he's doing on the pandemic, and about the highs and lows of worki...